Dear Preservation Supporter,

As someone who loves being in old places, I’m grateful that, while sheltering in place this May, I’ve been able to explore places through Virtual Preservation Month, thanks to the sponsorship of American Express. While I’ve missed attending house and garden tours and other events in-person, it was a revelation to see the breadth and depth of the preservation world from my laptop.

On the landing page, I could see that we are everywhere—saving threatened places; digging up new stories in archaeology; discovering hidden pasts behind walls; making, serving, and eating food; keeping our Main Street businesses alive; playing games; stitching and pickling; remembering the places of quarantines past; and yes, even changing the narrative of American history.

Since the advent of the internet and virtual reality, people have pondered what these technologies might mean for the preservation world. Will people still value the experience of being at the real place?

Even in the pre-coronavirus world, it would have been difficult for me to be in Tryon, North Carolina, to hear singer Vanessa Ferguson perform at Nina Simone’s Childhood Home. Yet even through my laptop, her performance felt intimate and personal, and captured the power of creating music where the famed activist and musician grew up.

Through the Alice Austin House virtual tour, I was able to see the incredible view across New York Harbor, and at the same time see an overlay of historic photographs—images that Alice Austin herself saw through the lens of her camera—making manifest the idea that the past is constantly part of the present.

At Kykuit, I may not have paused to look if I were on a tour, but online I stared at the image of an Alexander Calder sculpture against the landscape of the Hudson River for long minutes at a time, losing myself in the magic of that juxtaposition and the thought that Nelson Rockefeller positioned the sculpture in exactly that place. I was seeing for a moment through his eyes.

In a sense, the virtual world has always existed in preservation. Books and art have long played a role in spurring people to see old places anew, from Notre Dame Cathedral, which became valued again after Victor Hugo published The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to the paintings and writing of the Charleston Renaissance, which helped spur the preservation movement. The virtual world may be thought of as another medium that helps people see these old places, no more radical than the printing press, or that first wax cylinder of music that allowed people to hear concerts from performance halls all over the world.

Old places are rich and complex in sensory experience, and there are aspects of place that cannot be replicated virtually. For example, the Pope-Leighey House was designed to create an emotional response as people moved through the low-ceilinged entrance into the height of the living space, and as visually stunning as the virtual tour is, it cannot fully capture that feeling of expansion Frank Lloyd Wright designed, nor the faint background scent of the cypress walls.

It requires some imagination to conjure the feeling of these places online, just as it does in books, music, or architectural drawings. But preservationists have always been able to imagine possibilities. Who else looks at a dilapidated building and sees not only how it looked historically, but a vision of what it might become?

I hope preservationists continue to embrace the virtual world for its extraordinary access, information, and imaginative possibilities, and as another tool to save these places, so that we can visit, in person, when we can.

Warm regards,

Tom Mayes Chief Legal Officer

Pictured above: Large Spiny by Alexander Calder overlooks the Hudson River in Tarrytown, New York, at Kykuit, a Site of the National Trust.